The protests in Iran

According to the autocracy of Iranthe protests in your country are the product of a foreign conspiracy. Is there evidence of it? We know that, in the face of official censorship, the US government made it easy for protesters to access the Internet. But other than that, there is no evidence of significant US government involvement. For now, I would add the Iranian regime.

We know, for example, that the then head of the CIA in Iran, Kermit Roosevelt, paid people to take part in demonstrations against the only democratically elected president in Iran’s history, Mohamed Mosaddeq. We also know that Ayatollahs Abolcasem Kashaní and Mohammad Behbahani (who participated in the coup against Mossaddeq), coordinated with the CIA and even requested financial support.

We know all this through documents from the United States government itself (in addition to a document from British intelligence), declassified in 2017. For the rest, US intelligence itself blames its Israeli counterpart as the author of the murders against nuclear scientists. Iranians in recent decades. In other words, it does not take great malice to suppose that Western powers could be involved in what is happening in Iran.

That said, the probable foreign interference is not enough to explain the recent protests or their magnitude. On the one hand, this interference would have been a constant since the middle of the last century, while large-scale protests are a phenomenon that began in 2009, after allegations of fraud in the general elections of that year. And, by level of participation, because they have taken place in the 31 provinces of the country and because they have lasted a month, the current ones are the largest protests since 2009. That is, a variable that does not change over time (foreign interference), it would not be enough to explain another that does (the protests of great magnitude).

What other variables could explain the magnitude of the ongoing protests? On the one hand, there is one of the usual suspects: in 2020, GDP per capita had fallen by about 70% from its peak in 2012. Although this is partly due to external shocks (such as US sanctions or the pandemic), in 2013 the then Iranian president, Hasan Rohaní, admitted that a large part of the explanation was government mismanagement. To explain the magnitude of the current protests, another variable could be added: although there were severe restrictions on presenting candidates, the elected authorities had limited powers, and the elections were neither free nor fair, at least competitive. That is to say, sometimes (as in the case of Rohaní himself), candidates who were not preferred by the clerics who actually govern the country won. That changed in the 2020 elections, in which, for example, half of those seeking to be candidates for Parliament were disqualified, including 90 parliamentarians who intended to seek re-election.

This would have led to the confluence of two sources of protest that used to be activated separately: protests for political reasons and protests for economic reasons. And it would be relevant to remember that a vein of the literature on the social origins of democracy attaches great importance to an eventual alliance between professional middle classes and unionized workers as the driving force of the democratization process.

But the key variable in explaining the likelihood of large-scale protests leading to regime change is often internal cohesion within the ruling elite. To put it bluntly: as long as security forces under the command of the ruling elite are willing to kill protesters, regime change will be virtually impossible. The confluence of the protests with the poor health of the octogenarian Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, could lead to the emergence of fissures within that elite in the fight for succession. But for now there is no indication that this is happening.

Source: Elcomercio

Ronald Payne

I, Ronald Payne, am a journalist and author who dedicated his life to telling the stories that need to be said. I have over 7 years of experience as a reporter and editor, covering everything from politics to business to crime.